The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Page 22

  She didn’t say or open her eyes but simply increased the volume of her prayer and the pace at which she was spitting its words out at me.

  I couldn’t stand it. I had done nothing wrong, as far as I knew. Never hurt her or Daniel or anyone she cared about. On top of it all, I loved her. I genuinely did. I had done nothing to deserve being cursed at and labelled with vile words! I flew towards her and grabbed her by her wrists, the only parts of her upper body not covered by her pyjama dress.

  She tried to push my hands away and run so I pushed her against the wall in response and threw the whole weight of my body onto her to keep her there, while gripping onto her flesh as tightly as my hands would hold.

  With my mind, I jumped right into the memories of her muscles and ran through its stores as quickly as was possible. The recent days of drinking, staring blankly at objects that used to belong to Daniel, sobbing on Charlie’s shoulder or one of her other sons’ shoulders, I skipped past without looking at properly. I went right for the morning she found Daniel dead, right to the moments and hours before she screamed and woke us all up. And when I got there, I watched.

  When I read a person’s memories, I see the world through their eyes so I saw me, right next to her as she woke up on Baker’s sofa, fast asleep, oblivious that she was kissing me gently on the lips. It must have been quite some time before I woke because the living room was still very dark and there were no signs of light behind the curtains yet.

  Into my ear, she whispered that she loved me and followed through by kissing me gently on the lips. I didn’t budge, nor do I have any memory of her doing so. I had everything I wanted right in front of my face and I hadn’t even realised it.

  She got up and put on her clothes. Walked to the front door and smiled at herself when passing the mirror above the console table closest to the door. On her way out, she took the time to inhale the freshness of early morning air and observed birds stirring in the trees as the first hints of daybreak illuminated them. From the way her view moved up and down ever so slightly, I deduced she was walking with a bounce in her step.

  Back in her own house, she went right up the stairs to the second floor. She passed Daniel’s bedroom on the way to her own. His door was open and he was already awake, jumping around in his cot, screaming to be let out. She said good morning to him, verbally, but left him in there to go into the shower in her own bedroom. His screams for her, she could hear even with the door closed so she turned the radio within on, perhaps to drown his sounds out. She took a shower and sang a couple of songs while doing so, including that new song we heard just the night before, the one that made me see red circles of equal sizes everywhere.

  When done showering, she put on a clean bathrobe, towelled wetness out of her hair and went back out to the landing, humming as she did so. On the way to the stairs, she passed Daniel’s bedroom again and turned her head to look in as she passed. This time, he had one leg hooked on the edge of his crib and the other balanced unsteadily on his tiny toes. He screamed to be let out the second he caught sight of her. She ignored him a second time, fluffed up her hair and continued towards the stairs. Behind her, baby Daniel continued to beg, his high-pitched, whiney voice the only sound in the air. And then, very abruptly, out of nowhere… a thud.

  A loud thud. Daniel’s whining stopped then and for a good thirty seconds afterwards, there was only an eerie, hair-raising silence all around.

  Ethel stopped in her tracks, then took ten steps backwards to get to his door. Before she could get there, however, his screams started up again. This time though, they were not whiney. They were louder, sharper and obviously screams of pain.

  She stopped when right outside his door and looked in.

  He was as Gigi and I found him, but still alive then, fighting a fight he clearly had no way of winning. More importantly though, he was all alone. There was no one else in the room with him. No humanoid figure. No alien. No one at the window. It was just him, and gravity, and the heaviness of bad choices weighing down the air around him.

  Ethel stared and didn’t move to help. I think she understood how far beyond saving he already was. She simply watched him and listened, while his large, teary blue eyes stared right at her, pleading her to come over, until the screams stopped abruptly and the air between them became suffocatingly thick with silence all over again.

  She took a really long time to move again after that. Blinked many times, perhaps hoping to change the scene she was seeing, but that ghastly sight never once changed itself. Thirty minutes passed before tears appeared in her eyes. By that time, the sun had already come out fully and was making the horrors of what was in front of her clearer than ever. Her vision became blurry for a few seconds, a welcome respite from what had been, but the second she blinked again, there it was, terrifying as ever.

  Eventually, she screamed.

  I let go of Ethel’s wrists after that. That very scream had haunted me for days after I first heard it and I knew well enough what came next to know I didn’t want to be seeing it all again. I had seen enough horrific scenarios in my lifetime to know it wouldn’t do me any good to be seeing more.

  Ethel put both her hands on my chest and shoved me forward with all her strength. She ran to her vanity table, picked up the sculpture of a cross she now had sitting on it and held both that and the cross from the wall out at me. “Be gone, wicked alien!” she screamed. “You deserve to burn in hell for killing my son! Go to hell! Go to hell!” There were no purple ovals anywhere on her person as she said so. Only red circles around her cheeks, over blue skin that was spreading a layer of blue across the carpet and almost all of the furniture in the bedroom.

  She wasn’t lying. She truly believed an alien killed her son, I think, or wanted to, even though I now knew none of us had. The medical examiner hadn’t been mistaken when he wrote Daniel’s death off as an accident. It wasn’t that they hadn’t known any better; it was simply what it was. I nodded, understanding, at last, why Ethel had been behaving so strangely since. “You do what you need to do to feel better, okay?”

  The scratching of brushes that had been in the background for some time now became the only thing I could hear, blocking out all other sounds, including the prayer Ethel began chanting to make me disappear. She was sobbing now too and soon the screeching of bad violin notes in my ears was just as loud as the scrubbing, making me wince.

  I found myself crying along with her, because I knew, from having seen other mothers in similar situations, she was likely never going to be the same person again. The blue on her person would likely never go away nor would the red circles of equal sizes on her cheeks. If she ever sounded like harps again, they would just as quickly give way to bad violin notes. Nothing would ever erase the damage this one event had done to her life. She would never be ‘normal’ ever again but neither would I ever be able to relate to her and connect with her in the same way.

  “You’re right,” I said. “You’re right. The aliens did it. They did. It’s not your fault.”

  “Charlie will kill them all! I already told him to. And if he doesn’t get them, I will! I will kill them all! I will!” She flung one cross at me, then the other, then began removing grooming items from her vanity table’s drawer and flung them at me.

  I let the objects hit me, despite knowing it wouldn’t make Ethel feel any better at all. “Do you want to come with me? I can take you away from here. Keep you safe from aliens. Always.”

  “They will pay,” was what she said to that, with a sudden chilling calm that made her look every bit like a woman possessed. “Charlie and Baker will make them pay. They will hunt every last one of them down and kill them. And I will help them.”

  That made tears come out of my eyes. “I loved you, Ethel Powers. Don’t you forget that.”

  “I will kill every last one of them, I swear to God!”

  “I loved you.”

  I gave her one last smile—a smile she never saw because she was too
busy looking for more hard objects to throw at me—then flew out the window, alone.

  As I moved away, ten feet up in the air, using the clouds around me for cover, I took one last look at the roof of Baker’s house and thought back on my stint as a ‘normal’ person.

  There were aspects of it I enjoyed, but many others I didn’t. I was happy that I’d done it but almost just as happy to be leaving it all behind. It was too much effort for too few rewards, I thought. Not worth giving up precious time and hobbies for.

  I left Northridge knowing I’d never marry again.

  I never considered going back to check on Ethel either.

  About the Author

  Anna Ferrara is a mostly-closeted lesbian who spent over a decade working in the television industry of a country where all forms of media are heavily censored. In 2017, she got tired of churning out content she didn’t feel for and turned to self-publishing to do what her environment wouldn’t allow her to. She has since self-published 3 lesbian romance/mystery/suspense/horror novels, all of which are full of twists, angst and lessons in life and living. You can find out more about her life and work at annaferrarabooks.com.

  If you enjoyed this book and would like to express your support for the author, please do leave her a review on Goodreads.

  Other Books by Anna Ferrara

  The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

  (Those Strange Women #1)

  A psychological mystery full of clues hidden in plain sight. Can you figure out what’s really happening to the lesbian protagonist before the novel ends?

  In 2030, Lane Thompson, a ‘nobody’, sat on the edge of a rooftop in New York and smoked a cigarette. Moments after, her body was found on the concrete fifty floors below, broken and soaking in blood.

  Three years later, Lane wakes up at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, fully recovered. Her doctor doesn’t allow her to leave because she doesn’t remember wanting to kill herself and she doesn’t even mind because she thinks living at the Centre for free is way better than struggling financially on the outside.

  Her plan to stay on forever is thwarted by Paul, a woman and fellow patient, who manipulates her into leaving. Paul insists the Centre is not what it pretends to be and drags Lane through the underbelly of New York as she tries to prove that they are so much more than mere ‘nobodies’.

  What Lane soon discovers about herself and the woman she last loved dearly—movie star, Arden Villeneuve—makes her question everything she thought was true.

  Problem is, how do you find out what’s really going on when you can’t trust anything anybody says?

  The Woman Who Pretended To Love Men

  (Those Strange Women #2)

  In 1999, Fleur de Roller walked into a tea house in Hong Kong and introduced herself to Milla Milone, daughter of a New York mob boss. Sparks flew.

  Despite the obvious chemistry, Fleur repeatedly denies having any feelings for Milla because she has secrets—another identity and a job she can’t talk about—that might get her into big trouble if the possibly dangerous younger woman ever found out.

  Trouble comes anyway when the frustrated Milla moves on, starts dating other women, and leaves Fleur all by herself amidst a fervour of loss and wanting.

  Fleur has to decide if the career she worked so hard to establish is worth the lies she has to put on to get ahead or if the ‘alternative lifestyle’ she read so many negative things about is worth giving up her well-paying job for.

  She also has to decide if Milla is safe to love because Milla seems to be hiding a whole assortment of secrets of her own.

  About the Those Strange Women series

  Those Strange Women is a series of six books about the lives of six ‘unusual’ women over nine decades. Amidst changing attitudes towards women and homosexuality, the women grow, adapt and find their own ways of existing in a world in which they don’t quite belong. A few of them learn to love but most learn to hate; a few of them fail to thrive but most survive and develop a taste for revenge.

  Snow White and Her Queen

  Before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was another story some preferred not to tell.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

  “You, my Queen, are fairest of all,” the Princess had said, unravelling a nightmare of obsession and forbidden desire.

  At an apple orchard in the dead of the night, Queen Katherine runs into her reclusive stepdaughter for the first time in 17 years. Surprised by her ravishing beauty and unconventional boldness, she pursues a friendship, only to find herself inescapably captivated by the Princess’ charm and wanting more.

  “The Princess is a thousand times fairer than me,” she concludes in an inexplainable fever of despair that shocks her servants as much as it does herself.

  But at a time when romance between women is unthinkable, the Queen has to put on all the pretence she can muster to keep her horrible secret from both her powerful husband and the smitten huntsman trying to win her heart.

  To make matters worse, seven peasants and a handsome Prince threaten to snatch the Princess’ affections and take her away from the castle for good.

  The Queen has to decide once and for all what to do about her strange feelings for the Princess, before she misses her chance.

  This intimate retelling of the popular Grimms’ fairy tale will change your understanding of the wicked Queen’s infamous jealousy forever.

  Snow White and Her Queen

  (Sample)

  Chapter 1

  30-year-old Katherine wrapped her legs around her 48-year-old husband as a wife should and mimicked the moaning of a woman enjoying the sensations of lovemaking.

  The King pounded into her and grunted as his flesh tore against the delicate inner skin of her privates.

  Every exertion he made felt like a butter knife ripping her skin out raw but Katherine moaned as if it were the most pleasurable activity, in hope it would make the torture end quicker. It stung so bad, tears rolled out of her eyes onto the pillow. Fortunately, the King had his eyes shut.

  He would be so pissed if he knew. She rubbed away the tears as subtly as she could and moaned even harder, praying for the release from this hell to come soon.

  It was coming. The King jerked with increasing frequency, blowing hot air that smelt of the peacock from supper down towards her chest. She moaned louder to help him get there sooner. Louder and louder, matching the fevered pace of his grunts until at last his mouth shot open and his face turned completely red.

  At last, the stinging stopped. The heavy King collapsed upon her naked bosom. Katherine let out a huge sigh of relief, masked in the guise of a sigh of content.

  When he pulled away from her, she gazed at him as prettily as she could, hoping it would make him drop sweet kisses on her face and sweet nothings into her ear.

  But, as he had been doing for many years now, the King simply picked up his clothes and dressed.

  “I love you, my King,” she said, trying her best to sound as sultry as was possible amid the soreness between her legs.

  A snort was what she got in reply. “I’ll believe that when you actually give me a child.” The King slammed the heavy door behind him.

  He had not even looked at her once before leaving.

  Katherine sank into her feather mattress, all alone in the gold-lined four-poster bed they once shared. She was glad he was gone. Or was she? She squeezed her eyes shut. Please, please, please, she begged her body, just be with child this time. Any more years of childlessness would mean the end of her status as Queen once and for all, and justifiably so. What the hell is wrong with you, Katherine! Just carry the damn child already!

  Something seeped out from between her legs and made her eyes snap open. She threw off the bedcovers and jumped off the bed stark-naked.

  It was too late. There on the silken white sheets was a fresh red stain. Her monthly curse. The inescapable remind
er of how her body was not working as a married woman’s should.

  Her spindly fingers flew over her forehead and she wailed. Not again. Not again! The servants would tell the King all about this tomorrow and he would curse her for wasting his precious time. It had happened so many times before she feared the worst if the King were to know it had happened yet again.

  Katherine dashed to fetch water from her washbasin and applied a generous amount onto the patch of red. She rubbed violently with her fingers in hope it would remove the offending sight.

  The water mixed itself up with the blood and expanded the patch of red along the web of silk threads. With every frantic rub, the red spread further and further across the sheet until almost a quarter of it was transformed by a giant patch of dull red. If there had been some hope of hiding it before, there certainly was none now.

  Bitter curses flew out of Katherine’s mouth when she saw what she had done. Another mistake. Another failure on her part. When would you ever get anything right, Katherine! She held her blood-stained hands away from herself and cursed her body. Cursed her own stupidity. Cursed her slow reflexes. And finally, she cursed fate and smashed a very expensive flower vase against the wall.

  Now the King would most certainly be hopping mad, she thought as she stared at the shattered bits of worthless porcelain scattered on the carpet next to fresh roses. Oddly enough, that calmed her down. She wiped the wetness off her face and went to wash her hands in the basin.